Documents may routinely become lost or disassociated from a main or master file. When these “lost documents” are found, it may be difficult or even impossible to determine the master file to which the lost documents need to be returned. For example, in the case of physical or hard copies of documents included in a master file folder, a person may remove the individual documents from the file folder and then fail to return all the documents to the file folder, or the individual documents may simply fall out of the file folder. As another example, in the case of digital or soft copies of documents included in a master file stored in a digital database or other digital storage system, the individual documents may become disassociated from the master file in the database due to some error. In either case, in order to return a lost document to its correct master file, a person would need to examine the lost document for any identifying information and then attempt to remember or search for the correct master file for that document.
As one example, this issue may occur within a given office or network of a financial institution that offers different lending products, such as home loans, car loans, business loans, student loans, and the like. In this example, each of the different lending products may require a customer to provide multiple financial and tax documents to the financial institution. In some cases, the receipt and processing of these documents may be time sensitive in order to secure the requested loan and/or to avoid foreclosure or even bankruptcy. If one of the necessary documents becomes lost, the processing and approval of the lending products may be delayed and the customer may need to provide additional copies of the same documents in order to proceed. In addition, even in situations where the documents are not lost, the same document may be needed to process two or more loan requests for same customer. Attempting to reuse the same documents across the different loan products may but difficult or impossible without requiring multiple copies of the same documents from the customer.